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Aboriginal question the most important moral issue in Canada

A spiritual and psychological disorientation prevails among many aboriginal people in Canada. For the future of the country, that needs to change.

Canada needs to launch a process that will bring aboriginal people into the political stewardship of the country as co-equals, Irvin Studin writes. Here, Clayton Tootoosis from the Onion Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan takes part in a rally on Parliament Hill on Dec. 10, 2013.
(Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By Irvin Studin

Sat., Dec. 27, 2014

As we note the second anniversary of the founding of the Idle No More movement, there can be little doubt that the aboriginal question is by far the most important moral question of Canada’s early 21st century. No other public question in Canada has its historical weight, inertia and complexity.

But what is the aboriginal question for this century? Are we talking about standards of material well-being for aboriginal people? Is it about social status and professional opportunity? Or does the question turn fundamentally on the vindication of specific legal and constitutional rights?

The answer must begin with the brutal premise that the aboriginal people in Canada still live as history’s losers; that is, most of the aboriginal people in Canada are descended most recently from people who in their legal, social, economic, organizational and geopolitical interactions with non-aboriginals — principally European settlers and their own descendants — were over time and for a variety of reasons stripped of territory, prestige, rights and the underpinnings of social and material well-being.

In some cases, they were plainly outmanoeuvred; in others they were tricked; and in others still they were assimilated, killed or sickened by extracontinental diseases. The aggregate effect of these blows was historical defeat for the majority of the First Nations to the white man — a defeat that has mercilessly conditioned the logic of the relationship between First Nations people and what would become Canadian governments and Canadian society.

To this day, the aboriginal people have generally not been relieved — in their own minds or in the minds of the winning majority — of the status of Canadian history’s losing people. This is not a merely formal status; it is a properly psychological-spiritual one. It means that to a large extent the negative drag of the aboriginal question today continues to be psychological-spiritual in nature, and that a good part of the answer to the aboriginal question must deal frontally with this reality.

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The creation over time in Canada of a properly bilingual, bicultural and binational state points the way forward on the aboriginal question. Canada’s great success in responding to the challenge to internal unity and cohesion posed by the linguistic and cultural differences between the English-speaking majority and the French-speaking minority has been premised on the idea that the endgame consists not in perfect harmony or amity between the tribes, but depends instead on how a historically victorious majority can rehabilitate and resuscitate defeated minorities into political and even cultural co-equals — co-equals who are equally invested in the continued existence of the state.

Historically defeated, the French Canadian in Canada, and in Quebec especially, today walks with his or her shoulders held high, properly self-respecting and in turn respected by the English-speaking majority as politically equal and as hailing from a culture that is just as prestigious as the Anglo-Saxon culture of the historical victors in North America. The French language is today not only studied in all schools of English-speaking Canada, but is held in equally high regard in official national institutions and, just as importantly, in the minds of most Canadians. An anglophone can therefore become prime minister of Canada while being a rank naïf in international affairs, but not without more or less mastering (and respecting) the French language.

The rehabilitation or resuscitation of the French Canadians in Canada from historical losers to political and cultural co-equals did not happen overnight. It took at least a few generations of conspicuous pushes in policy and constitutional reform — propelled also by the heroism and strategy of many intellectuals and political actors from French Canada in general and Quebec in particular.

While there continues to be (and always will be) great debate in Canada and in Quebec about degrees of respect, dignity, constitutional power and division of responsibilities, the character of the French Canadian or Quebec question by now has precious little to do with historical tragedy and the lower extremes of basic material and social well-being for French Canadians and Quebecers. Instead it is, in its sweet spot, a question about how to govern between centre and region or between the general and the local.

Of the four major Anglo-Saxon democracies with large indigenous populations — Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand — it is New Zealand that has enjoyed the greatest success in the relationship between its indigenous peoples (mostly the Maori) and the white majority. Unlike indigenous people in the other three countries, the Maori in New Zealand are highly represented in the professions, in the national army, in sports (most famously dominating the All Blacks rugby union team and inspiring its magical haka) and in politics, where the national parliament affords a designated number of seats exclusively for Maori representation.

To be sure, the Maori also suffer from many of the social dislocations of indigenous people in the other three countries; however, in no case do the indigenous populations of these countries have anything resembling the upside suggested for New Zealand’s Maori on the score of most indicators of socioeconomic well-being.

There would seem to be one signal reason for this difference: the Maori fought the colonizing white man more or less to a strategic draw in the mid-19th century. While its interpretation (and implementation) remains hotly contested, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the founding constitutional document of the New Zealand state, reflects this broad logic of strategic parity between settler and native. As such, the constitutional-political development of the New Zealand state has, in the main, been in the direction of making the Maori the constitutional-political equal of the white man in New Zealand — that is, self-respecting and respected by New Zealand’s majority, including linguistically and in national rituals and symbology.

By contrast, a deep spiritual and psychological disorientation prevails today among many members of Canada’s First Nations. This disorientation — or spiritual anomie — stems from strategic loss in history. It conduces to an insufficiency of self-belief and self-confidence, reinforced by a general and painful disrespect or outright misapprehension (at best, indifference) by and from the white majority. If we accept this premise, then the challenge for Canada must be to appreciate this spiritual-cultural disorientation and, over the medium and long term, to launch a process that aims to consciously rehabilitate and resuscitate the aboriginal people into co-equals in the political stewardship of the country.

Indigenous history and tradition themselves arguably anticipate this path for Canada. Brutal and not infrequent wars took place among the many powerful indigenous confederacies prior to contact with the Europeans. These wars yielded winners and losers — changing but, critically, still preserving the relationships between the belligerent nations. The victor nations became the “big brothers” in the relationship, assuming a responsibility to look out for the “younger brothers” — that is, to protect them from their remaining enemies and to rebuild or reconstitute them so that they could become allies. In other words, victory led to protection and resuscitation of the defeated, which led, for purposes of survival, to reasonable co-equality in alliance.

Clearly, part of this push to co-equal status in Canada for the aboriginal people will involve making the binational logic at the heart of Canadian constitutionalism far more porous for purposes of aboriginal representation, control of territory and governing responsibilities. This will require us to reimagine the internal borders and identities of Canada in ways that are more eclectic than the very Cartesian 10 provinces-plus-three territories paradigm that predominates in most school textbooks and therefore in the psyche of most Canadians.

The vector of culture — far more than rights or economics — must dominate in the resuscitation of the aboriginal people. A pivotal aspect of this cultural game surely must be the stimulation, revival and mainstreaming of aboriginal languages. Renewed study across Canada in provincial schools of, say, Cree, Ojibwe, Inuktitut and Michif — to take but four major aboriginal tongues — would not only give Canadians a better understanding of aboriginal realities and mentalities, but would also lend prestige to the aboriginal cultures that were relegated to the peripheries of Canadian society.

Aboriginals, in turn, would be given an opening and an audience for the proliferation of books, magazines, blogs, films, radio and television shows across Canada and internationally in tongues that have renewed currency and credibility.

We might then imagine a Canadian prime minister, in the year 2050, easily mastering English, French and Cree — all in the larger context of the aboriginal people having become co-equals in the governance of Canada and equally invested in the continued existence and success of this Canada.

Irvin Studin is Editor-in-Chief &amp; Publisher of Global Brief magazine, and President of the Institute for 21st Century Questions.

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